Comment by cvoss 4 days ago
The US gov's intention was not at all to shut down TikTok. It was to force ByteDance to sell it.
The fact that ByteDance is opting for a shutdown instead is a huge PR stunt, and their unwillingness to sell under the circumstances kinda proves their whole First Amendment claims are made in bad faith. Something deeper is going on, and it's not about your social security number.
The timing of this with the Israeli crimes in Gaza is clear.
https://www.thefp.com/p/tik-tok-young-americans-hamas-mike-g...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/13/tiktok-...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/16/tiktok...
https://theintercept.com/2025/01/09/tiktok-ban-israel-palest...
https://www.aljazeera.com/program/the-listening-post/2024/3/...
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/28/business/tiktok-israel-ha...
Israel's practices are historically so insidious. The more I learn about that state the more disturbing it is.
People have said it before but the clear internet is increasingly under Israel's influence. X's have silenced so many Palestinian accounts.
Western social media have platforms that allow states to censor content, and they have to comply. Under the guise of misinformation ofcourse.
Lots of countries have made it illegal to listen things like Radio Free Europe. I'm guessing you can't in North Korea. On the other hand, a US citizen that wants to get the Chinese perspective on anything has lots of ways to legally find that and repeat it. I am not saying a lot of people in the US are interested in a foreign point of view, or that the US doesn't have tons of propaganda. But I don't think you can convince anyone that the two countries treat speech the same way.
> On the other hand, a US citizen that wants to get the Chinese perspective on anything has lots of ways to legally find that and repeat it.
What do you mean by "Chinese perspective"? Do you mean people's genuine opinion or the official government talking points?
Feels a little bit like the Chinpokomon episode of South Park - innocent kids being brainwashed and whatnot. (I know the target in that ep is Japan, but still)
I think that China is working to control left-wing activism in the U.S and TikTok is the perfect trojan horse to split the Democratic party and elevate their bribed proxies. I'd rather not go into how they're doing it, but certainly massive focus on the Gaza war in TikTok did do a number on the unity of the Democratic party.
Speaking of China influence I keep getting these stories on my social media feeds: Isn't this overpass, road, or this building, or this city in with lots of LED lights in China just great? China is the future, and so on!
If you feel that the national security angle is a farce, do you similarly feel that the DoD banning TikTok on government systems was just for show? https://defensescoop.com/2023/06/02/pentagon-proposes-rule-t...
The DoD banning an app on their network is a lot different than banning it competely in the US. I would think DoD should ban most apps connecting to their networks that aren't work related. I feel this whole effort is either in bad faith or isn't being transparently communicated to the public.
Except there was never a discussion of banning TikTok the app. Which is why a sale of the app was always an option.
NatSec should not even be needed. A simpler reason could be that China bans foreign social media apps from operating in China, so Chinese apps should be treated as such.
Reciprocity is not a good idea. Why would we want to copy every bad foreign law?
> Reciprocity is not a good idea.
Sometimes it is. Especially, if an adversary is bad to you, you should not be good to him. You should be equally bad, or sometimes worse.
That's how wars are won. Those who are nice to enemies because of "values" get crushed by the ruthless opponents.
Reciprocity is a great idea. It takes the emotion out of the decision: we don’t allow X from Y because Y doesn’t allow X from us. It makes sense for trade at least.
Then there is no need to find another excuse that might be offensive.
The difference is, of course, that only one of those countries CONSTANTLY bangs on about being the "free" world, about "free" markets, about how not saying the n-word is censorship etc.
In short, it's only hypocritical for one of those countries.
In both cases though, for normal citizens your own country and it's companies are far more dangerous than some random country halfway across the globe.
most bases still block twitter, facebook, flickr, etc too
https://www.wired.com/2009/06/despite-army-order-some-bases-...
i think there are obvious reasons why bytedance would not want to spawn a US-based competitor and why a US only social media network would be ineffective.
this is exactly the same as what China does with their gfw, they allow american apps to divest and be owned by a chinese company.
Wrong
1. China asked American SNS companys to 'obey Chinese laws', which mostly refer to content control and data ownership, these companys refused, China didn'tforced them to sell 2. Are you sure to play the 'same as what China does'? hey, we are a totalitarian, authoritarian, dictatorial regime, are we same? think twice
2. The game can be slightly different. "hey, we are open by default. but if an authoritarian regimes wants to exploit our openness by marketing their apps while at the same time banning our apps from their market, then we will strike back".
paradox of intolerance and all that..
If we played the same as China does, we'd be hacking Baidu through a vulnerability in a Microsoft web browser until they withdrew completely from the American market.
1. Yes, China forced the sale of Uber China to Didi - this is well documented.
2. Did I say that? No. I am opposed to the tiktok ban
China forced the sale of Uber China to Didi - this is well documented
really? > https://www.bbc.com/news/36938812 > https://www.heritage.org/international-economies/commentary/...
Let me tell you a cruel fact - Uber is completely unable to compete with Didi. You have no idea how fierce the competition in this industry in China is.
Uber died before it grew up in China
Heck, China forced Apple to divest iCloud to the government of Guizhou.
it's about data ownership, part of data compliance, citizen data can not be pass to abroad, of course, it's also about content censorship
Microsoft and Tesla accepted the same rule
You can understand it as the US gov requiring TikTok's data must be hosted by Microsoft in the US
Social media is the front line of an ongoing cyber war. It is a matter of propaganda and social engineering.
Imagine if Japan owned all the newspapers in the run-up to WWII.
That's not to say China is the only one with propaganda.
It's unfortunate that this comment is buried so deep and that generally this topic is under discussed.
Media has always been a force for controlling popular opinion, but in the age of social media it's going to new extremes. There are forces that try to control how you see the world on all social media platforms and do so to attempt to shape your opinions of the world and modify your actions.
You can visibly see Reddit has been completely taken over by bot, shills, and other controlled accounts. There is no sincere, real human opinion posted on the front page.
Even HN is not immune. "Bad news" has long been forbidden here, and there is a range of topics that, even when heavily upvoted by the community, tend to disappear within minutes.
> there is a range of topics that, even when heavily upvoted by the community, tend to disappear within minutes.
Such as? Disappear as in getting flagged?
Large portions of the things posted to the Oakland subreddit get flagged and removed. Almost anything mentioning the city in a negative light gets flagged. Crime reports / trends, anything.
Sarcastically chuckling about the state of the city as a long time resident gets the ban hammer.
It is really quite something.
Massively controversial on HN, leading to lots of flagged posts (due to a mix of legitimate flame bait and emotional kneejerk).
Everyone knows HN is censored. Let's test your theory though. Here is a litmus test:
Is it true that women unknowingly engage in Eugenics when choosing to procreate only with tall men in large numbers?
Or another test:
What happened to Epstein's video tapes stored in his NY mansion and why were the people in them not prosecuted?
Think about it...
Imagine if one company owned all the local news papers and replaced all the content with wire stories and the lowest quality local content or a fox news like company bough local news to run a propaganda operation. Oh wait that's real.
"Imagine if a handful of ultra-billionaires controlled almost all social media in the US." doesn't feel less threatening. The fact that Congress doesn't consider this a problem feels like the bigger problem.
>The fact that ByteDance is opting for a shutdown instead is a huge PR stunt
Um, what? There is zero chance that ByteDance could get a fair price for TikTok. VC calculations can be disregarded, TikTok as a platform is more valuable than Facebook. How much money would it take for Zuckerberg to sell FB to a Chinese company?
I mean, the Chinese government was never going to let the US just take their company at bargain basement prices.
China didn’t need to fight to keep Grindr because all the value from the acquisition was realized as soon as they ran a database query to compile a list of closeted Republican senators. No need to hold on once you got the spy treasure.
It wouldn't have been at a bargain basement price if they started trying to sell it when the law passed. It could have been the highest market price they could get from the US's largest buyers.
Obviously they don't have the same leverage when they're otherwise going to be shut off in a few days.
I don't see how people don't see what is their most likely rationale - the ban will be temporary. Trump's already come out against it and is going to work to reverse it once in office. If it can't be done directly, it'll be done like usual - as an addon to some must-pass bill.
I think they would probably refuse to sell in a situation where they had reason to expect the ban to persist (for different reasons), but in this case they probably didn't even consider selling when there's a high probability they'll be back legally operating in the US within a year.
Or another act of Congress! But given that the Supreme Court is waiting to the last second to issue their ruling, I don't think it's all quite as clear behind doors as you seem to believe it was in front of them. The nuance of claiming that constitutional rights do not apply to a company legally operating within the country, because of its nationality, has extremely broad implications as a precedent - well beyond corporations alone, even for a judge who might be more than okay with the ban in and of itself.
Beyond this, there's the matter of enforcement and implementation. The former is discretionary and the latter is not specified by the bill. An effective ban would effectively require the creation of a Great Firewall of China type mechanism to effectively implement (which is what I thought this law was always a sort of 'trojan horse' for). Otherwise the "ban" will be trivially sidestepped by using a web app, downloading an APK from their site/mirrors instead of the marketplace, etc. Let alone things like VPNs! As Chinese companies are increasingly banned from the US, we're likely to see more adversarial setups where these companies will make no effort to prevent US customers no matter how much the US government madly gesticulates, though again with the current administration said gesticulation will not even happen in the first place.
>The nuance of claiming that constitutional rights do not apply to a company legally operating within the country, because of its nationality, has extremely broad implications as a precedent
The law (PAFACA) doesn't directly apply to TikTok, but only to TikTok's ownership by ByteDance, due to ByteDance being a corporation located in a foreign adversary nation. Foreign corporations are not protected by the first amendment as domestic corporations are. Case law clarifying separate first amendment protections for domestic vs foreign entities such as Citizens United v FEC (2010) and Bluman v FEC (2011), already established the precedent for this.
>I don't think it's all quite as clear behind doors as you seem to believe it was in front of them
Did you watch the hearing or read the transcript? The opinions of the majority of the justices on both sides, including the chief justice, were not ambiguous. As referenced in the hearing by the justices, the first amendment only applies to communication on the platform, not the ownership of the platform. Given that TikTok's parent company is ByteDance, and as the first amendment does not apply to foreign corporations as it does to domestic corporations, which multiple justices pointed out, the law is not in conflict with the first amendment. The law is referred to as the "TikTok ban law", but it doesn't ban the platform explicitly, it only bans its ownership by a foreign adversary located corporation, which are not protected by the first amendment, which is how the law avoids a conflict with the first amendment while potentially still effectively banning the platform.
Yeah it’s about that algorithms could radicalize the population or turn them against each other
This isn't rocket science. What's going on is having the keys to the kingdom with regards to serving videos to influence the mind of a user with extremely precise targeting.
China doesn't want USA doing that, and banned their social media. USA doesn't want China doing it because they've been doing it all over the world to everybody since Radio Free Europe, and likely before.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Radio-Free-Europe